If you run the numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504505
You will see, that anything else other than a ground invasion, is guaranteed to give Iran a war victory.
You will see, that anything else other than a ground invasion, is guaranteed to give Iran a war victory.
America always goes to war with the handicap that 1 American life is worth hundreds of enemy lives. This handicap is why one gets the impression (illusion) that countries like Iran are able to hold their own against the great mighty USA. But if America stops playing as cautiously as it does, it turns into a very different war machine.
In fact, I suspect this "15 point peace plan" is just theater to this effect. "Look we tried everything, we're gonna have to go in and really knock them out."
Woodrow Wilson only joined WW1 once the Lusitania was sunk, which caused American deaths. FDR only joined WW2 once Pearl Harbor was attacked. Reagan got away with Grenada because it was a quick and dirty operation. Same with GHWB and First Gulf War. The younger Bush could justify the Afghan invasion only because of WTC, yet even as more Intel dropped on the identity of the terrorists and the lack of progress in locating Bin Laden, domestic support fell.
> But if America stops playing as cautiously as it does, it turns into a very different war machine.
Good luck trying to convince average Americans to do that. On the other hand, the US and Israel have managed to convince the same for the Iranians. They literally rained bombs on the upper class neighborhoods of Teheran, the places where moderates and regime opposition actually lived.
The war should not be won. it should be ended before everyone loses.
My analysis and my comment I linked to agrees. And that is a strategic victory for Iran, Russia, China and a defeat for Israel, and the US. The worst will be the Gulf States hostages of their dueling stock pile of defense missiles running out...to which they will have to queue for, with US DOD at the front of the queue.
False, Israel has used the whole war to take over Lebanon almost silently from mass media attention. They are about to annex a part of it.
It would remind me of that if Ukraine attacked first... over and over again throughout the last decades... together with it's allies in the region... occasionally abducting a few hundred Russia civilians... there is no parallel here.
No one serious is arguing this. Total nonsense as far as anyone in Lebanon is concerned.
>I don't beleive Israel is going to annex Lebanon but they may create a buffer zone in the south of the country.
So they are going to annex but under a different term. Got it.
I invite you to argue it, despite the Lebanese army, in their own words, "happily" working with Hezbollah in fighting against Israeli invasion into Lebanon.
> Also I don't beleive Israel is going to annex Lebanon but they may create a buffer zone in the south of the country.
This is called invasion followed by annexation.
There is this one weird trick for lasting piece with Israel: stop being hostile.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdd560nvqqdo
27 November 2024, IDF shoots at Lebanese citizens
https://www.firstpost.com/world/israel-hezbollah-ceasefire-i...
27–28 November 2024 Israel shoots and kills several Lebanese civilians in a different area, and injures more with a tank.
https://www.ft.com/content/a1b60922-edb4-4cde-a870-95010be89...
29 November 2024 IDF shoots at civilians at a funeral, uproots olive trees, demolishes homes in Lebanon, and shoots at journalists.
https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/30/israeli-army-pushes-deeper...
8 December 2024 An israeli airstrike kills three civilians.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/3-civilians-killed-in-i...
I have about a hundred or more such incidents. The only effective one weird trick with Israel is to not exist near it.
I'm genuinely curious: in the face of overwhelming evidence of Israel being a monstrous force of death and destruction in this world, and popular opinion continuing to notice this and thus turn against Israel, why do you maintain the old rhetorical defenses? Do you personally genuinely believe Israel is just defending itself? Most Israelis I talk to have long abandoned that as obviously false, so I doubt you're motivated by national fervor as they were - they usually would toe into Islamophobia instead: "if we didn't do it to them first, they'd do it to us." "Why didn't they develop their land in the hundreds of years before Israel arrived? Now Israel settled territory is farmed and flourishing." Those sort of arguments.
What do you think the endgame is here in terms of popular support? IDF soldiers gleefully post their war crimes on Instagram and we all watch it, it's not like the truth can be spun anymore.
The Hezbollah has always been a boogie man excuse for the Israelis to expand into Lebanon. Well, Hezbollah's gone now and we already know what's happening. Lebanon is losing close to a fifth of its land.
i wonder why you think mass media attention would matter.
https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/in-lebanon-there-are-no-mo...
"For the first time, a country enamored of compromises, half measures and trickery is watching these options vanish, replaced by a brutal choice: confront Hezbollah and risk destruction, or ensure it by doing nothing."
> confront Hezbollah and risk destruction, or ensure it by doing nothing."
This is ridiculous. When your nation's citizens are being wiped out into non-existence and your land occupied, will you support the invaders or the guys who are fighting the invaders ? Hezbollah now all of Lebanon as a recruitment pipeline. They have utterly no shortage of volunteers now.
The US is an oil exporting country and the people pulling the puppet strings of the dominant party in power directly benefit from high oil prices.
Further, oligarchical political-economic structures also benefit from "chaos is a ladder" scenarios where their privileged knowledge and access to decision makers gives them the ability to benefit from every new conflagration. The insider trading examples are only the trip of the iceberg.
The "war" will wind down after they've made their profits and redistributed the wealth and control as they set out to do.
Gone are the days where ruling elites benefited from international commercial stability. Those with power right now want chaos, and they will continue to create it until they are held to account.
Note that all of above applies just as well to the rulers of Iran as it does to the United States. It is the people who suffer, not the elites.
Interesting point.
If you step back, in 1979 Iran launched a revolution that had an avowed goal of “death to America”. If the Iranians play the kinetic scenario to the bitter end, they simply are demonstrating this was not mere poetry and there never was any other off-ramp, just tactically deciding at what relative strength these two systems will collide.
So Iran loses by demonstrating irrational resolve in antisocial tactics, like firing missiles randomly at neutral neighbors, which is the same precondition you take as gating victory. Conflicts are played out in the real world specifically to resolve inconsistent modeling like this held by different sides, and all parties would be well served by finding a better way to resolve the conflicting modeling here, because the most likely scenario currently is that everyone loses.
Step back further and you see that they were overthrowing a dictator that the US had installed over their democratically elected government.
- the enemy was intermingled with the "friendly" civilians, and they couldn't be told apart, leading to everyone being treated brutally and potential friends becoming enemies
- the enemy was prepared to fight to the death, for years if need be, and knew they could outlast US public opinion
- the enemy knew they could prevail because of centuries of history defeating much larger opponents (in Vietnam's case, of them previously defeating France and China).
All of these same conditions would be present in a ground war in Iran, with some religious fanaticism thrown in on top.
- the enemy had plenty of material, technical and financial support from adversarial superpowers who were all too happy to see American lives, money and military resources wasted.
That external support is not fully scaled up yet (despite clear reports of Russian intelligence support for Iran), but you can bet it would be in the event of a major ground assault, occupation, and/or counter-insurgency quagmire.
Vietcong weren't exactly fighting with 'plenty of material'. They used weapons from second world war, sometimes first world war, cheap Chinese crap..
Are you comparing that to Americans aircraft, bombs, helicopters ? It was as asymmetrical as it would be against Iran.
31 million people just woke up and decided to hate America? Or.. was there a little more to that story?
That's, what, 2,000 years before the settlement of Jamestown by Europeans.
I would not mind, and I actually wish america and israel and russia and few other states end as they are today (not just a mild refactoring, end and split to 10s of smaller independent entities, that can cause a lot less harm individually) and end up with reduced externalities on the rest of the world, and lot less power to walk over rest of us.
I don't even mind calling it death to america or whatever, because it would be. So why not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
These Iranians are so evil they want to kill even love:
https://fa-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%DA...
No one ever really wins in war, except those not participating.
* Korea: Stalemate, which is still a problem now 70
years later
* Vietnam: Loss
* Gulf War: Victory
* Afganistan: Loss, after 20 years of fighting
* Iraq: Mixed results after 8 years: Saddam Hussein threat
eliminated, Iran and ISIS made significant gains
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Iran is far more capable militarily than Iraq and Afghanistan and, particulary, their military may be world's the leading experts on assymetric warfare; they train everyone else - Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc. Their proxies held off the US military and allies in Iraq, a neighboring country, where Iran had far less motivation than to defend their own homes from a US invasion.
The US could win given unlimited political will and time, but it would be very costly and anyway, the US couldn't sustain that will for much easier situations in the prior two wars. Nobody is crazy enough to launch a ground invasion of Iran, I hope.
The idea that the Iranians will act on his wishes is a fantasy of someone who wants to win without paying the costs, as a freebie.
None of Iran's neighbors - e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan - want to or have any capacity to invade Iran. A destabilized Iran is a nightmare for them.
I sincerely hope too but the man is lunatic.
All the other wars depended on installing a friendly and competent government that would take over. That is a very hard thing to do. It’s too easy to support a friendly government that’s also corrupt and incompetent.
In Iran it will be the same problem after military victory. The US doesn’t want to run the show so what’s next? Nobody knows and it will take years to see where this is going. I hope they don’t destroy too much infrastructure there so people can rebuild quickly and society goes back to some normal.
> functioning societies
Sorry?
Trump war goal are to destroy Iranian nuclear capabilities, and to change the Iranian government.
If he succeed, victory. Otherwise, defeat.
Victory I guess.
.. per [John] on Krugman's substack.
All conflicts, with the exception of genocidal or total war style conflicts - end with some kind of settlement, in which each side makes concessions, and then tries to sell it as a victory to their domestic audience.
This will be no different, which is why people are already lining up to spin everything and argue about who is the real winner or loser. That they have no problem expoliting the conflict for domestic political gain makes it clear that no one takes this war very seriously.
If there was a real winner or loser, no one would need to argue about it, it would be clear to everyone, since the loser would be under occupation, and that's not going to happen here, neither to the US, nor to Iran. This entire war is two sides shooting missiles and bombs at each other from a safe distance.
Iranian people are being killed, so no. Cynically if you mean Iranian leadership, they're also being killed, so no.
American leadership and the Americans living in the seat of imperialism, sure.
But the point is that the missiles are being shot from a distance. There is no invasion. When Iran hit Dimona or Kuwait, it wasn't sending troops there, it was firing off long range drones and missiles. I never claimed the war has zero casualties, but I very much doubt the number of casualties will be even within an order of magnitude of a full scale ground invasion. It will be in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands.
On the other hand an inadvertant success, like Venezuela, could accelerate those plans.
If only Muad'dib were here. He could find a way through.
So can the US leaving Iran without means for existence. Right now Iran can export own oil but denies Arab countries form exporting their oil, I don't think such arrangement could last indefinitely.
Not saying it's a great plan but I think Trump may be thinking that way.